Accessibility Thoughts

Background

I’ve recently started looking at digital accessibility due to some questions from work.

Now this isn’t completely unknown to me – many years ago when I was training web technologies it was something to be aware of.

I thought that the best place to start was with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) as they are the guiding body for the Internet.

Turns out it was a good place to start as they have W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and offer a free ‘Introduction to Web Accessibility’ course.

Me being me, decided to take the course – now interestingly enough, the course is free, however if you want an award, they do offer a Verified Certificate for £72/$99, where they want proof to confirm your identity (picture of you and a picture of valid legal identification to compare against).

You’ll be unsurprised to discover that I have gone down the verified certificate route.

Course Experience

Working through the course I learnt a lot, but…

This course is designed to be a starting point for everyone, no matter what your technical skill is.

And that’s one of the things that I disagree with – not the plan, but the execution.

Simply put, a lot of accessibility (the design requirements) is about how the page is coded, so that as many people using an array of different techniques and tools can clearly access the content/information on the webpage.

And that’s the rub.

To be able to do that, the course talks a lot about coding.

Do you have your own website (no matter the content)? Did you code it yourself, or did you use a program (e.g. WordPress)?

While I have no doubt that there are people who code websites, there’s a lot more people who don’t.

So this intro course focusing quite heavily on best coding practice doesn’t quite live up to my expectations.

What did I expect?

I’ve given this some thought – I did expect explanations about a lot of things, giving a much fuller / deeper understanding of the situation, and a starting point with some of the simple things that can be done to improve digital accessibility, that then leads into other courses, focusing on different aspects depending on your role.

To be fair, there is a lot of information given that explains why we need accessibility, what accessibility means, what assumptions are made about people, the benefits of accessibility, and some processes that anyone can do on webpages to check it’s accessibility.

Improvement Suggestions

Looking at this course with a professional (trainer) critical eye would could be changed?

Take out all of the coding information and make that into a separate course, aimed at people who work with the code.

Add in some more generic things that someone with no technical knowledge could use, for example

• Simple best practice that everyone can apply: Alt Text, Headings, etc
• Tools for adding help for video e.g. captions or audio descriptions,
• Sign-posting the content,
• Reviewing current platforms and offering experience creating accessible pages with them,
• Adding some good practice on a couple of the popular tools – perhaps SharePoint and WordPress – giving good examples that can be used with almost any tool.

Bringing in the tools that the majority of people use to create web sites and web pages, to be relevant to a wide audience of creators.

Call to action

What do you know about digital accessibility?

If you have your own site, is it accessible?

What are you going to do to make any digital content you’re responsible for accessible?